(Reading time: 3 minutes)
We were just these innocent girls in the night trying to make something beautiful. We nearly died. We very nearly did, didn’t we?
Samantha Heather Mackey couldn’t be more of an outsider in her small, highly selective MFA program at New England’s Warren University. A scholarship student who prefers the company of her dark imagination to that of most people, she is utterly repelled by the rest of her fiction writing cohort–a clique of unbearably twee rich girls who call each other Bunny, and seem to move and speak as one.
But everything changes when Samantha receives an invitation to the Bunnies’ fabled Smut Salon, and finds herself inexplicably drawn to their front door–ditching her only friend, Ava, in the process. As Samantha plunges deeper and deeper into the Bunnies’ sinister yet saccharine world, beginning to take part in the ritualistic off-campus Workshop where they conjure their monstrous creations, the edges of reality begin to blur. Soon, her friendships with Ava and the Bunnies will be brought into deadly collision.
The spellbinding new novel from one of our most fearless chroniclers of the female experience, Bunny is a down-the-rabbit-hole tale of loneliness and belonging, friendship and desire, and the fantastic and terrible power of the imagination.
CW: Animal cruelty, death of animals, death of parent, self-harm, drug use, sexual content
Rating ⭐️⭐️⭐️✨
Review
This book follows a girl who joins a girlfriend group in her class. Although the premise isn’t new, the author’s approach is surprising. The book reminds me of the film Mean Girls but in a more disturbing and psychological way.
This book is part of the dark academia genre, and even though it is a good one, you sometimes find writing that is a little know-it-all. We didn’t have it at the beginning, but in some passages of the book, this kind of writing is there. It can be very annoying, as you feel so stupid, and in this type of book, you don’t need it as it’s already a mess.
In fact, it was strange to read, as most of the time, you struggle to understand if it’s reality or something due to a mental illness and only hallucinations. The fact that the main character is unreliable doesn’t help you to understand some parts of the story.
The main struggle contributing to the book’s ambiguous atmosphere is the Bunny. This group of strange girls plays a significant role in the story, as they ‘create’ weird things, and their dynamics are toxic. They look like a giant bunny with four heads; when you start the book, they don’t even have real names and look precisely the same. Throughout the book, it’s hard to separate them despite the descriptions of each of them. However, due to their (toxic) dynamics and the way they address each other, it’s hard to do it.
The book’s unreliable nature makes it a compulsive read, and the struggle to put it down is all too real. The psychology of the main character is a total enigma, and the events are intricately linked to it, making for a captivating read. The timeline also adds to the page-turning sensation, accelerating or decelerating as the events unfold.
Even if you don’t understand all the events, and sometimes it feels quite messy and blurry, the journey is worth it. However, it’s not for everyone, and be prepared, as the ending is quite an open one.
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